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How a Bookworm Broke a Hiking Record

Readers are welcome to comment here either on Nicholas Kristof’s column, “Beauty and The Beasts,” or on this blog post, which offers a more detailed look at Heather Anderson’s journey.

Heather Anderson at the start of her speed hike across the Pacific Crest Trail.

The first conversation Heather Anderson had with a mountain lion was a short one. On the 14th night of her record-breaking hike from Mexico to Canada, when a lion’s face appeared in the beam of her headlamp, Ms. Anderson obeyed her first instinct. She barked.

“I just was like ‘Woof! Woof!’ at the top of my lungs, I didn’t even think about it,” she said. The mountain lion looked back only once as it sprinted away. “Nobody says ‘bark at mountain lions,’ it just happened to be my gut reaction.”

And then, with a kind of reality-defying optimism, Ms. Anderson carried on. For 61 days, she hiked 44 miles in 19-hour increments until she reached the Canadian border. No man or woman has ever hiked the Pacific Crest Trail that quickly without outside support.

Ms. Anderson is something of an immigrant to the world of hiking. As a kid, she hated running and said her meal of choice was a bowl of Oreos in milk that she ate like cereal.

“I was this little bookworm that sat inside, and read, and was really overweight. I just really didn’t do anything active,” she said. She said she weighed around 200 pounds at her high school graduation.

When she went on her first hike ever, on the Appalachian Trail, her parents reminded her that it was okay to quit. She didn’t, despite trekking into hypothermic weather without a sleeping bag. (It was May, she had reasoned, and surely mountaintops have summers too.)
But if she didn’t have a veteran’s sense of nature’s whims, she assimilated with ease. She realized, she said, “that I need to be out there. To me the mountains are home, that’s where I’m the happiest and most comfortable.”

It helps that she has a low bar for comfort. On this trek, Ms. Anderson’s blisters, which she cheerfully photographed and posted to Facebook, stretched more than an inch across both heels and always lingered. At night, she was kept up by her own spasms, the excruciating pain in her legs competing with exhaustion for her attention.

She hiked the entire trail in a few thrift store dresses whose value she estimates at $1 each. “One of my favorite advantages of wearing a dress or a skirt is that I get to pee standing up,” she explained. She had recurring food fantasies, which tended toward the improbable. Like a barbecue tempeh sandwich, which wasn’t a fan favorite at the gas stations she patronized along the way.

In her mind, Ms. Anderson organizes the hike along state boundaries, and most of what went wrong happened in California. “Through most of California, for 1,700 miles, I cried for the first 1 or 2 miles every morning,” she said. The ritual was her only weapon against a full-fledged breakdown.

She remembers telling herself, “I’m going to just allow myself my little 15 to 20 minute pity party and cry and be like this is hard, and I don’t want to do it, and I hurt, and I’m tired and then be like alright now you’ve had that.”

There has been some controversy about Ms. Anderson’s feat, because another hiker, Josh Garrett, finished the same hike in less time. Mr. Garrett, though, had “support,” which isn’t as cushy as it sounds, but does mean that he had an assistant supply him with food along the way. Ms. Anderson walked to outposts where she had mailed herself supplies, which she says added 30 miles to her trip. The Pacific Crest Trail Association hailed both Anderson and Garrett for breaking speed records on the trail.

Heather AndersonMs. Anderson in Washington, about a week before finishing her trek.

The burden of going it alone revealed itself, for example, after Ms. Anderson broke her water-purifying gadget. She couldn’t order a supplement until she reached a town with Internet, and spent about a month drinking unsterilized water.

The approach was less an exercise in purism than in genuine curiosity. Ms. Anderson was in a sense inquiring about her own humanness. If the earliest versions of our species could do it like this, could she?

“In our evolutionary history we were nomadic people that would spread across the continent by walking, and so tackling a distance like this by walking was fitting,” she said “I just liked the idea that I was doing this on my own.

Just as she was crossing into Washington, on the final, punishing stretch of her journey, Ms. Anderson came upon another mountain lion. She said it couldn’t have been more than 10 feet away, staring at her like a bored teenager.

“I had reached this point where in my head, whenever anything bad would happen I would be like, ‘Nothing is going to stop me from getting to Canada’ so I yelled that at the mountain lion. And then I just roared at it, these primal yells,” she said, “I was just like, ‘Nothing’s going to stop me!’”

The mountain lion ran off immediately, but Ms. Anderson said she stayed there, for 30 minutes, shaking and roaring. Two weeks later she crossed the finish line.

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About Nicholas Kristof

This blog expands on Nicholas Kristof’s twice-weekly columns, sharing thoughts that shape the writing but don’t always make it into the 800-word text. It’s also the place where readers make their voices heard.